bearing blog

Asking for forgiveness.

When I was a kid, I got into trouble for ordinary kid-sort of things.  Not cleaning my room, backtalking (usually I didn't mean to backtalk, but somehow, I was told, things came out sounding that way), staying out too late, lying about where I'd been.

I often got myself into worse trouble for refusing to say "I'm sorry."  I was one of those people who reasoned, "I don't really feel sorry -- so it would be lying to say so.  I don't really think I was wrong -- no way am I going to 'admit' that I was wrong, since I wasn't."  

(I had not yet learned the fine art of the fake apology, so well practiced by public figures, the "I'm sorry that you were offended," or the "I'm sorry that you had to see this," much of which boils down to "I'm sorry that you got caught.")

After a while I figured out that it was sometimes in my best interest to apologize, and I did understand that.  I learned to say "I'm sorry" when I didn't mean it.  I learned that this sometimes made things better.

But as I grew to young adulthood, married and had a child of my own, I also remembered being a child, and I remembered the peculiar humiliation of being "made to say sorry" when I was utterly convinced I had done nothing wrong or even negligent.  It does happen, you know: just as happens to adults sometimes, children get misunderstood, misconstrued, wrongly judged.   And I grappled for a long time with the question:  what, after all, is the point of saying "I'm sorry?"  What is so important about it that adults teach children that they must say it to someone who feels they have been hurt, even if it is not a true statement?   What good does a "sorry" really do?  Is the pretense just social lubrication, like pretending you care about the weather or  the local sports team during obligatory small talk?  Or is there some meaning?  

Perhaps I was overthinking it, but I felt that it mattered.  I was a young adult on the verge of having to teach a child of my own.  I have never been satisfied with repeating the lessons that were drilled into me, at least not without understanding them.  I wanted to teach my child something I believed.

My first child was a toddler learning to speak and interact with others before I figured it out, in a sudden insight:  I saw the framework -- maybe just "a" framework -- in which an "I'm sorry" made sense.    

What I realized is this:  The purpose of an apology is to invite forgiveness.

Let's say that Billy believes Alex has harmed him, and is angry.  It may be that Alex intentionally hurt Billy, or it may be that Alex negligently hurt Billy, or it may be that Alex did nothing at all and Billy's made a mistake.  It may be that Alex ought to be punished for what he did, it may be that Alex owes Billy restitution, it may be that someone else deserves to pay, or it may be that no one is at fault at all.  

One thing is certain to help and not to hurt:  if Billy forgives Alex.

Christian doctrine requires believers to assert this, but so do many other sources.  Look, even the Mayo Clinic says that forgiveness will help.  

What clicked for me that day is that an apology does not necessarily have to be understood as pretending sincere regret (what if I know I didn't do anything wrong?) or repentance (what if I am still feeling angry and haven't yet received the grace of penitence?).  

This is so even if the words of an apology come out sounding something like "I am sorry, I was wrong."  The words are conventional words, part of an exchange that is ritual and thus has unspoken meaning.  They are an idiom.  They are not meant to benefit the apologizing speaker, by expressing the feelings that are inside him, so that the speaker feels his true feelings has been heard.  Rather, they are meant to produce an effect in the hearer.   

The intended effect?   To make it easier for the angry hearer to let go of his anger, to make it easier to forgive.  An apology is an invitation to forgive.  We say whatever we can say that will produce that effect.  If we cannot bring ourselves to say "I wronged you," perhaps because we know something different has happened, then at the very minimum perhaps we can bring ourselves to say, "Will you forgive me?"

+ + + 

Getting back to the children.  When I got my head wrapped around the idea that an apology is an invitation to forgive, I no longer fretted about how to teach my children to apologize sincerely.  In this framework, a "sincere apology" means an expression of a sincere desire that the other person forgive you.  Even if it is hard to be sincerely "sorry" sometimes, especially when wrongly accused, it is easy to sincerely ask for forgiveness.  Who would ever wish a grudge on anyone?  

So when my child says, "But it wasn't my fault, so why do I have to say sorry?" that is what I explain:  

You will apologize to her so that it will be easier for her to forgive you.  Jesus says we have to forgive each other, and it is hard to forgive when we are angry, so you will make it easier for her to forgive you by asking for her forgiveness.

I gave them a formula to follow to make it super-easy, so they will never have to search for words.  It goes like this:

"Jane, I'm sorry I stepped on your toy.  Will you forgive me?"

"Drew, I'm sorry I wasn't looking and I ran into you.  Will you forgive me?"

"Sue, I'm sorry I said words that hurt your feelings.  Will you forgive me?"

They have to speak the person's name, they have to look them in the eye, they have to follow the "I'm sorry" with a statement that acknowledges why the person feels hurt, and they have to ask for forgiveness. 

(Furthermore, if the person they hurt is a much smaller child, I require my kids to approach the child's mother or whomever and say, "I'm sorry I hurt your baby.  Will you forgive me?")

And of course, when one of them asks the other for forgiveness, I require them to say "Yes, I forgive you."  As soon as they can.

+ + +

Sometimes the brother and sister, summoned to enact the Apologize So She Can Forgive You script before me, are already smirking at each other as they recite.  I catch the little gleam of "There goes Mom again with her apologizing thing."  I like to see that.  It proves they aren't holding a grudge against each other; it's more fun to share a silent inside joke about their mom.  I hope they are still reciting it to each other and laughing many years from now.

+ + +

Of course, there is a drawback to this particular script.

It's the fact that when I correct my children, or shout at them, or say "Argh!  Again?  How many times do I have to tell you?!?"...

...they ask for my forgiveness.

Sometimes many times a day.

My eleven-year-old will stand there listening to me lecture him for a full minute and then when I stop he looks me in the eye and says, completely seriously, "I'm sorry I didn't finish unloading the dishwasher, Mom.  Will you forgive me?"

My five-year-old will look up at me through her tears and say "Mom, I'm sorry I crumpled up my math sheet.  Will you forgive me?"

My eight-year-old will glance shifty-eyed at me and say "Mom, I'm sorry I woke up my little brother.  Will you forgive me?"

And that is when I discover how hard it can be to say "Yes."  

There is such a temptation to turn it into a "Yes, but...."  which, basically, is not a "Yes" at all.  

I am still the parent and "forgiveness" does not mean nobody experiences any consequences or pays restitution.  I find, though, that the tone is altered:   I cannot, with a straight face, say "Yes, I forgive you" and then go back to shouting about a punishment.  It comes out, a little awkwardly, with some explanation:  "You're going to have to do two math sheets now, to remind you that you mustn't crumple up your math sheet just because you don't want to do it."  "You're going to have to finish sweeping the floor for me, because now I have to get your brother back to sleep."

And after it's been one of those days, sometimes I think:  Damn it, why did I teach them to ask me for forgiveness?  How many times do I have to forgive?

How many times, indeed?  

Perceived deficits in the homeschool.

There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.

I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.

What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?

If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school?  Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes.  I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people.  I learned a lot in those classes.  But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse.  A lot of it is hit-or-miss.  Few schools of any kind excel at everything.

Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student?  How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school?  It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.  

Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match.  When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year.   When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized.  It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.  

But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate.  Magnet schools!  There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes.  There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out.  There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen.  And yes, there are college-preparatory schools.   They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways.  Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.

And this is a good thing.   People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to).  It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.  

The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.

 The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that).  The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).

The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.

That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.  

That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships:  parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.  

That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.

That is the essence of homeschooling.  That is its specialty.  That is where it shines.

+ + +

H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great.  I love having my kids with me all day.'  It's true, and it's the reason I do it."  Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize.  Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.

I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day.   Especially if it had been one of those days.  You know I have no poker face."  But I went on:  "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either.  I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them  that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.  

"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.'  Which is also true.

"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.'  But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better.  Most people get that."

+ + +

Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often?  I really think it's because we are constantly  judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.  

We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.  

We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds:  immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.  

Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those?  (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.)  So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee...  because nobody else is doing all that either.  We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them.  We can't do it with everything.

We are families.  Families!  As different as families can be.  

We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.

That's all.

Deficits in the homeschool.

Lacking time this morning, I just want to pull an exchange out of the comments from the Moving the furniture post, and try to continue the discussion here more visibly.  It reminded me of a conversation I had on FB with another one of my commenters/friends.

Tabitha:

I am homeschooling an 8th, 6th, 4th, 1st, and preschooler. Next year I'll add in the now 3yo as a preschooler. I'll still have a barely 1yo at that time, too.
I consider this a one room schoolhouse, for sure.

We're trying to make decisions for next year for high school for my oldest. The thought that keeps running through my head is that "There is a reason one room schoolhouses ended in 8th grade." I want to be able to make it work, and many families do. I'm just not sure I'm capable of adding high school into this mix.

Any of your amazing readers have any thoughts?

I wrote:

Well, my plan for high school has been to try to get my kids as independent as possible before they get there! I figured that we would be spending a pretty big chunk of eighth grade working together -- the eighth-grader and I and my husband that is -- to decide what needs to be in the curriculum, which textbooks and other materials to use, and how we're going to put together his portfolio or whatever it takes for applying to whatever postsecondary institution he winds up being headed for.

 
I haven't ruled out enrolling any of the kids in a traditional or nontraditional high school, if that is what it takes, to be honest. We are fortunate to live in an area where there are many schooling options, even à la carte coursework at a small independent Catholic academy centered around our parish.

But we are also enjoying the benefits of co-schooling with other families, which has really opened up a depth of learning that I didn't think was possible to organize on my own, because we (the parents) have been able to specialize in areas of personal interest to us. But we're still maintaining the cozy familiarity of being among people who care about our kids and really know them.

 
I guess what I'm getting at, with all that, is that the high school student ought to be taking on a lot of the responsibility for his own learning. He's got to. He needs to have the kind of self-discipline that most people don't have to show until they are a freshman in college, when Mama isn't around to make him do his homework anymore.

I may be around, but I'm busy with younger kids, you know?

Tabitha again:

 ...My oldest 2 are already very independent.

I thought my high school plan was going to work. 8th grade has shown me all the deficits, though, and I don't know if I can overcome them. She needs some one on one time and it's hard to make that consistently happen.

I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized. I don't feel like I can do both justice. I've long envied your co-schooling set up. You are very blessed!

Me again:

"I'm starting to see school through 8th grade as more general and high school as more specialized."

My theory: yes and no. You have to be somewhat specialized by that time, because there simply isn't time in the day to do everything, and so your student is going to choose to study some things and not others (or be constrained to do so in order to meet requirements she may meet later).

But you can still be aiming for a strong liberal arts education, which is by definition well rounded and broad, with deeper "dips" here and there into areas of special interest to give a sort of taste of specialization. There is time for specialization in college or on the job.

The proper place of high school is to develop the child's mind into the adult one, and to fine-tune the skills of self-teaching, the "lost tools of learning" that Dorothy Sayers wrote about in her famous essay. The subjects are just the material on which the mind cuts its teeth.

Every school (home or institutional) has inherent deficits, and you could look at the ones in your own home school as teaching tools for learning how to learn -- because identifying and remedying deficits in the resources available to you is a basic tool for self-teaching. I would say, bring the 8th graders into the discussion of what seems to be missing from their environment, and work together on the challenge of restoring it.

 

There are a couple of different threads here worth picking up.  I wouldn't mind writing a co-schooling post discussing how it is that I (with my engineering degree) have so far "specialized" in teaching Latin and History to children, while my partner in co-schooling (with her English degree) has, maybe more predictably, "specialized" in literature and grammar, but also primary-school art appreciation, music theory, and handcrafts.  It all reminds me of the post that Amy Welborn wrote yesterday, "Gifts and Talents:  Overrated?"  To define my mission as "that for which I have been prepared" would be... rather limiting.   

But what do you think, readers, about the idea of embracing the "gaps" in the available educational resources as an opportunity to learn how to learn?  Bringing the young person into the design of his own homeschool, understanding that no school can specialize in everything, every school of every kind has inherent limitations, and the home school is no different?  

(Let's just take landscape as a starting point.  My homeschool is in the middle of the city, within easy reach of a huge library system, museums, theaters, historical sites, and parks... but I have a tiny postage stamp of a backyard, a neighborhood where people don't really send their kids outside to play, and not as much time as I would like to leave the city.  A rural child would get a lot more opportunities for gardening and in situ nature study, but maybe not so much museum and zoo time, or practice riding the city bus or walking to the library, or even my 11-year-old's beloved opportunity to study alone in a neighborhood coffee shop.)

Anyway, my thought is that as you are approaching eighth grade and the start of high school, it is time to have a frank discussion:  What does the young person want to learn?  What external requirements must be met?   What can the homeschool provide?  What are its strengths and weaknesses?  How can the strengths be channeled best, and the weaknesses compensated for?  What resources does the homeschool have which remain untapped?  Where can the parent and the young person work together to bring them to fruition?  

I know it's a bit cliché to recast a deficit as an opportunity -- but in the case of the homeschool it strikes me as really true.  We are preparing these young people for life as a human being in the world.  The world is full of barriers, and human beings are full of deficits.  Learning to come up against them, and either work our way around them or live, constrained, with acceptance and humility, is a good thing.

"When Ordinary Parenting Practices Can Land You in Court."

That's the title of a blog post at the Volokh Conspiracy today.  I encourage anyone interested in the "free-range kids" movement to read the post and then click through to the legal article by David Pimentel that the blogger is referring to.  It's called, "Criminal Child Neglect and the Free Range Kid:  Is Overprotective Parenting the New Standard of Care?"

Lots of good stuff in there -- the whole article is worth reading.  A lot of problems are caused by vague statutory language that requires "reasonable" behavior (who decides what is reasonable?) and that implies parents are criminally negligent for not eliminating certain risks to their children.  It appears that jurors are regularly ready to punish parents who have different parenting styles that appear merely substandard to the jurors.  Jurors and prosecutors who are themselves parents of only one child appear readier to punish parents who are accused of neglect because they left one child in the care of another (say, a three-year-old in the care of a twelve-year-old sibling).  If you think the mommy wars are bad enough when they are outside the courtroom, imagine being a mommy accused of neglect, about to be tried by a jury of her peers!

Political question: Minnesota edition.

Ok, here it is.

Is taking four children ages 2 to 11, all by myself, tomorrow evening at 7 pm, to the GOP caucus (yes, that is "caucus," not "primary" -- no quiet voting booths here), in a parks building in our urban neighborhood, and doing my part to help take down the most horrible candidates, 

(a) a valuable educational experience for the older children, and a way to model participation in the political process

(b) admirably responsible, since otherwise no one from our family will be able to make our voice heard in the caucus/primary stage, which appears every year to increase in importance over casting a vote in the general election

(c) courageously positive, as I make a stand for inclusiveness of people with small children to care for even at 7 pm in the evening

(d) unnecessary, because everyone knows who is going to win the nomination by now anyway

(e) certifiably insane

(f) pictures or it didn't happen

For the record, if I remember right, in 2008 my neighborhood caucus actually went for Ron Paul.  I had my husband with me when we went, and we took the kids (three of them, then) because we didn't really have another choice that night if we wanted to go.  It was the first presidential caucus I'd ever been to.

The building in 2008 was absolutely crammed full, which fairly shocked me, because Republicans and conservatives are downright invisible in our urban neighborhood.  You never, for example, see any lawn signs.  The GOP usually doesn't even bother fielding any candidates to any significant local positions, although occasionally people running for school board will get an endorsement.  But that year there were a very large number of what appeared to be young libertarians, some of the hipsterish variety and some of the dreadlocks-under-my-oversized-toque variety, and many of them waving signs.  The oldsters who had brought cookies and punch -- not that there was any left -- were standing around at the edge of the room, blinking and wondering what had hit them.  I got the impression it hadn't been like this in 2000.

Teens/tweens and sleep.

This isn't new material for me, but something to think about anyway:

 As adolescents grow, their sleep cycles change (Carskadon, 1999).  During adolescence teens tend to stay up later and sleep later. Some of these changes are explained behaviorally...But some of the changes are due to intrinsic, biological changes. Even more seriously, researchers, doctors, and teachers are realizing that circadian rhythms and school schedules are out of synch (Carskadon, 1999). The result is excessive sleepiness, inferior academic performance, and even accidents.

Pioneering research has begun to focus on circadian rhythms and circadian rhythm disorders ...Measurable by biological events, like melatonin, circadian rhythms control the timing of rapid eye movement sleep (REM). Research is beginning to show that circadian rhythms are developmental and change with growth from childhood, to adolescence and adulthood.

One of the most fundamental benefits of homeschooling is that it leaves families freer to choose their own schedules.  That includes sleep schedules.  Most days of the week, I could, if I chose, arrange things so that the children and I could sleep very late or take naps in the middle of the day -- at least in theory.  We have no buses to catch, after all.  

Kids generally don't get enough sleep when they have to keep to a school schedule that starts early in the morning and leaves no room for a nap:

Early survey research at Stanford University, showed that as pubescent girls matured they preferred evening to morning schedules... In other words, as the girls' bodies changed so did their sleep cycles. This is more than staying up late to have fun. Changing sleep cycles are biologically based. Furthermore, parent surveys and teen sleep diaries indicate that during the school year, teens average about 2 hours/per night less sleep than in the summer. The effect is cumulative. So losing 2 hours sleep each night adds up to a total of 10 hours lost sleep by the end of the week.

As adolescents' bodies change, they stay up later but still show afternoon dips in alertness. Previously believed to be a sleep pattern of younger children, who once took naps in school, this "siesta" effect is pronounced even into later adolescence. Changing circadian rhythms of adolescent bodies and early school schedules are out of sync. 

Looking back at my own late adolescence, especially my first experiences with setting my own schedule in college (my freshman year, of course, but before that I attended a summer credit-earning residential program for high school students)  -- I vividly remember how quickly I (and many of the others my age) re-adopted the afternoon nap that hadn't been possible since kindergarten.  Often, after returning from classes, I'd pass out on my bunk and not get up till the dining hall was about to open.

Looking specifically at my preadolescent son -- he is 11 -- I could let him sleep as long as he wished almost every morning, and let him set his own schedule for schoolwork most of the time.  He's proven himself responsible and capable of plowing through his daily to-do list with little supervision, and it is obvious that he has developed the ability both to self-teach and to know when it's time to ask for help learning something.

Typically, though, I haven't given him total sleep/work freedom.  There are a few pressures that work against the "everybody can sleep as much as they need to" model, at least in our family.  The challenge is in finding the balance.

(1) The rest of us may not have to be out the door early in the morning, but Dad does.  If a teen sleeps in late, he misses time with his father (or whichever parent is the breadwinner) that he could otherwise be having.  Of course, he could get more by staying up late -- but many families prioritize early bedtimes because it gives Mom and Dad a block of time without interruptions.  

(2) I like there to be a time in my day when I'm "done" with school.  I get a feeling of satisfaction when everybody has cleared out of the schoolroom early enough that I can straighten it up and leave it  in the late afternoon.  

I realize that a mother's schedule is not meant to conform to outside-world expectations.  But deep down I like the illusion of having something less like a vocation to which I give myself fully in my my every moment, and more like a JOB, because JOBS eventually have a quitting time, after which I can crack open a beer and put my feet up and chat with my husband about his day.

(3) A fairly predictable school schedule is the tool that helps me give time and attention to each child over the course of the day.   This is a big deal.  I have to have enough time in the morning, and enough time in the afternoon, especially to work one-on-one with my five-year-old and my eight-year-old.  (Thank God my five-year-old learned to read precociously early, because that is one less time-intensive activity I need to work on with her.)  We have a rule around here:  "You may not interrupt me if I am teaching someone younger than you."  If my oldest were completely free to set his own schedule, it would be trickier for him to work with mine.  

Still, the daily schedule may not be optimized; perhaps I should re-evaluate it with tween-sleep as a high priority.

(4) I try to do a couple of school subjects, as well as lunch, together as a family.  This means calling my older kid away from his own work -- or his bed -- and bringing him "in touch" with the rest of the children.  

(5) We aren't totally isolated from the outside world and its schedules.  There's Sunday morning Mass, for one thing -- and if we sleep in and go to late Mass, there's just so much less of the day left to play.  Two days a week we co-school with another family, and that means getting up early (at least when it's our turn to drive and car-pool) so we can start early enough to get the work done and get home to Dad.  When doctor's appointments and such need to happen, first thing in the morning seems best because it interrupts our day the least.  

(6) There is pressure to teach conformity with the outside world.  Someday he's going to have a job, and it might make him get up in the morning and keep a traditional workday schedule, right?  

In theory, I reject the "but he'll have to learn it eventually, so we have to work on it now" philosophy.  Most lessons can wait for developmental readiness most of the time, and there is much more natural motivation to learn when the natural need arises.  Still, all homeschoolers (I think) have to make decisions like this all the time.  Even though as homeschoolers, our children don't have to jump through the same hoops as all those "normal" people, when they are adults they will be expected to act like "normal" people some of the time, and we want to prepare them to be able to  conform by choice when it's in their best interest.  

Sooner or later most people will need the skill to arrange sleep schedules in order to meet somebody else's demands.  The question is, do they need practice with this more than they need... well... sleep?

It's yet another are where we must decide how best to strike the balance among the natural needs of each individual living in the family, all with one eye to the sometimes unreasonable but often unavoidable demands of the outside world.  This is never a simple question, and parents encounter it and answer it -- not always easily, and not always willingly -- again... and again... and again.

Real work.

Given a plastic toy "workbench" by a distant relative for one's second birthday, complete with plastic hammer and plastic saw and plastic wrench and an array of sound effects that ring out when one pounds the plastic pegs or cranks the plastic bolt or saws the plastic wood in the plastic slot --

-- obviously, it is much more interesting and worthwhile to locate the real recessed screws that hold it together, and then toddle off to find Mommy's real Phillips-head screwdriver so you can take the thing apart.

Wouldn't you?

Pandora's sugar bowl.

Monday evening I announced, "Muffins for breakfast tomorrow!"

And the children fell to their knees (okay, it was only the 11-year-old) and begged, "Please, Mom, don't make them completely whole wheat!  Put some white flour in!"

I raised my eyebrow (okay, not really; I am physically incapable of raising one eyebrow; probably I just made a frowny face) and said, "Oh, come on, they're not that bad.  Muffins are quick breads. You barely notice the difference in muffins."

"They don't taste as sweet as other people's muffins."

He probably has a point there.  I don't like to eat super sweet muffins, so the slight bitterness of whole wheat flour has never bothered me, and I usually do not add extra sugar to make up for it.   

Maybe if I could have kept my children's taste buds safely sheltered from the world, he would not know what he is missing.  But this past year the 11-year-old has acquired the freedom to range around our urban neighborhood unsupervised.  He has, I suspect, tasted the illicit luxury of coffeeshop muffins bought with his own money.  There is scant going back once innocence is lost.

"Or, Mom, at least could you put more sugar in them?"

Hmph.  Philistines.  "How about I sprinkle a little sugar crust on top?"

"No, it's the middle that isn't sweet enough."

"But it'll have blueberries!"

"They're sour."

I turned to my spouse, the food processing engineer, who (a) has to stay somewhat abreast of the nutrition literature, and (b) has perfected the art of rapid calculation followed by a guess that makes it sound like he knows exactly what he is talking about.  "Mark."

"Hm?"

"If we had to live on homemade muffins, would it be better for us to eat low-sugar muffins made with some whole grain flour and some white flour, or would it be better to eat whole-grain muffins with more sugar in them?"

He rolled his eyes at me (okay, he probably didn't roll his eyes, but I'm not sure how to describe what he did.  Let's say he made a "here's a caveat" face).  "You realize that all the relevant research about this sort of thing is inconclusive."

"Yeah, yeah."

"Well, if it is an either-or, my instinct -- just my instinct, mind you --"

"Duly noted."

"-- is that it's better to keep it 100% whole grain and add the sugar.  Because the relevant research does indicate that more whole grain is associated with better outcomes.  And also the white flour has the same effect on your body as sugar anyway.  So at least you're not leaving out the additional nutrition and fiber, even if it comes with sugar."

"Got it."  I turned back to the pleading child.  "Okay.  This time I will make sweet muffins."  I stormed into the kitchen (okay, I probably did not storm so much as stalk) and made these.  They weren't blueberry because I discovered the dried cherries while I was rooting around in the fridge.

Extra-Sweet Cherry Yogurt Muffins

• 1 cup yogurt thinned with a little milk, OR 1 cup buttermilk, plus extra if needed (which you will)
• Heaping 1/2 cup dried tart cherries
• 1/4 to 1/2 tsp almond extract
• 1 egg
• 3 Tbsp butter or coconut oil, melted and cooled, or other oil
• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup sugar (it hurts my teeth just writing that -- a *tablespoon* in every muffin!)
• 1 Tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt

The night before:  Put the dried cherries in a bowl and add enough thinned yogurt to moisten all the cherries.  Stir and let soak overnight in the refrigerator.  (Even a half-hour's soak will do some good, if you don't have overnight.)

In the morning, grease a 12-cup muffin tin and preheat the oven to 400° F.  Beat the egg and melted butter together with the remainder of the thinned yogurt.  Add the almond extract.  Mix the dry ingredients together in a medium bowl, then gently stir in the liquid ingredients and the cherry-yogurt mixture.  Add more yogurt and milk if needed to moisten all the dry ingredients (it's hard to say how much liquid will have been soaked up by the cherries).   Divide among the cups of the muffin tin and bake for 20 minutes; test with wooden pick before removing.  Allow to cool in the pan 5 minutes before taking the muffins out of the cups to finish cooling on a rack.

+ + + 

Now let me tell you something.  I do not (repeat, do not) like sweet muffins for breakfast.  And the idea of these terribly sweet muffins -- I used the amount of sugar suggested in Mark Bittman's "Sweet and Rich Muffins" recipe, but did not add the extra fat -- kind of horrified me, which is why I used yogurt instead of the ordinary whole milk I usually used; I thought perhaps it would balance the sweetness a little bit.

Fatal mistake.   I should have left it unbalanced.

These were very yummy muffins.  I had a taste "of Mark's, to evaluate it" and now I am personally responsible for demolishing three of them.  

So now I have this "aaaaagh, what have I done?!?!" feeling.  I fed my kids a tablespoon of sugar in their muffins and I liked it.  This is less sugar than in the most current formulation of Cocoa Puffs.  

Argh.

 Of course the kids liked them too.  I am still going to write "dried cherries" on my grocery list this week.

But, argh.

 

Ugh: Anti-sibling messages.

Normally I am very pleased with the children's magazines put out by Carus Publications, producers of Cricket, Ask, Ladybug, and several other titles.  Each of my children receives one subscription.    Generally they're very child-positive, and the science articles in particular tend to be well done without much dumbing down.

Boy, howdy, though, I couldn't let this one slide.  This is the back cover of the January 2012 issue of Odyssey, the science magazine aimed at kids aged 10 to 16:

 

Yeah, you read that right.  The little sister is hugging the big sister, and the big sister is rolling her eyes and wishing the little sister had never been born.

The context here is that this month's issue is about "annoyance."  The consulting editor for the issue is a professor of psychology as well as brain/cognitive science.  There are articles about the role of cortisol, about talking being more effective at calming oneself than texting, about how the sound of whining children distracts mothers more than the sound of whining table saws, and about how psychologists classify "annoyance" among five basic emotional states.  There's even a sidebar explaining that some sounds, such as crying babies, are annoying for a good reason:  because they signal a need that we're supposed to meet.

But that picture... I'm sure it's supposed to be funny, but I'm disturbed even by the notion that this appears in an educational magazine.  If they had pictured a girl sitting in a desk rolling her eyes at a teacher and thinking, "Tell me again why I haven't dropped out yet," I bet they'd get an earful from the classroom teachers who make up a sizable portion of their subscriptions.

Anyway, I called.  "I'd better leave the room," said the 11yo as I dialed the phone, "because I don't want to hear you yell."

"I'm not going to yell," I said.  "It's not the fault of the person who answers the phone number published in the magazine."  So the kids watched.

I talked to a very nice young woman named (I think) Kirsten, who when I said, "I have a comment about the January issue of Odyssey" told me to hang on while she got a copy of the magazine to look at.  Once I got her onto the back cover, I described what I saw.  

"I see a younger sister giving a hug to her big sister.  The little girl is looking up at her big sister with a loving smile.  The older sister is looking away and expressing regret that her little sister was ever born."  I went on to explain that I found it disturbing, that my children found it disturbing (the 11yo was the one who showed it to me), and that I assumed it was supposed to be funny; but that the "funny" fell flat, because it's just not representative of the child-positive messages I expect to see in the Cricket family of publications.  Children aged ten to sixteen are exactly the age group who are most susceptible to negative messages about the value of younger siblings, I went on.  I am happy to have every one of my kids.  My children are happy to have every one of their siblings.  I want it to stay that way.

"See, I didn't yell," I pointed out to the kids after I had left my contact information, acquired the name and email address of the person to whom my message should be directed, and ended the call.  

"Sometimes you yell," observed my 8yo.

I thought about it.  "Yes, sometimes I do.  It helped that I knew the person on the other end of the line didn't have anything to do with the cover, and that she was very polite and listened to me.  It's much harder to keep yourself from yelling if the other person is rude."

The senior editor of Odyssey is Elizabeth Lindstrom, and her email is elindstrom@caruspub.com .  

(NB. If you're reading this long past the issue date of January 2012, consider the post outdated.)

 

Spanish from Latin - more information.

Hannah's Google-fu proved worthier than mine this week:  when she typed search terms into the box looking for useful information to support our current project of building Spanish onto Latin, she found this in-depth article:  "Spanish for Speakers of Latin."  The author (who is not the site owner) appears to be a hobbyist rather than a professional linguist.   Probably for this reason, the article is concise and user-friendly (at least for me, a would-be language nerd).

(Because, really, I'm a would-be everything nerd who has not quite enough time on her hands.)

So the paper begins like this:

This page is intended to introduce an English speaker familiar with Latin and learning Spanish to the correspondences and differences between the two languages and the skills necessary to apply knowledge of Latin in studying Spanish.

 

1. The Historical Background
2. Orthography & Pronunciation
3. Patterns of Phonetic Transformation
4. Grammatical Development
5. Essential Derivatives
6. Portuguese

 

I am by no means an expert on the matter. I am not even fluent in Spanish. This is just my own set of observations, which may not be wholly accurate.

Come on -- doesn't that just make you want to keep going?  It does me!  

Here's a bite from each section:

Historical background:

[lots of stuff preceding it]

This is how Spanish has come to establish itself today. By a series of lucky coincidences, it has become more and more like English. First, note that the Goths, Franks, Saxons, and Vikings all spoke related Germanic languages. When these various tribes began to learn Latin, they naturally preferred ways of saying things that were closest to what they already knew. When the English were conquered by the Normans (Vikings from Normandy who spoke Old French), they subsequently replaced over nine tenths of their language with Norman French, and later imported a slew of words directly from Latin. Thus both Spanish and English derive from a base of Germanic language speakers learning dialects of vulgar Latin from adjacent regions. The upshot is that the feel of Spanish, including the structure, the vocabulary, and the very way of looking at things, is very much like English, much more so than Latin is, and far more so than, say, Sanskrit. But because Spanish is directly derived from Latin, whereas English has had Latin grafted on somewhat gradually and haphazardly, a knowledge of the original Latin still contributes a great deal more to understanding Spanish and is very helpful for dealing with both languages.

Orthography and Pronunciation has subsections on accents, vowels, and consonants.  Here is a bit from the vowel section:

The vowels of Spanish are the same as in Latin, except that all distinction of quantity is lost, and y is treated as identical to i. They are pronounced like the Latin long vowels but are generally held for only a very short time. This feature of the language allows Spanish speakers to comfortably speak at nearly twice the rate of English. English speakers should particularly be aware that there is no y sound at the end of the vowels e and i, nor a w sound at the end of o and u.

e.g.: lego as Latin lego (not as leygow)

Diphthongs are basically as in Latin, but ae and oe are written ai and oi, with the former no longer forming a diphthong.

e.g. traer as tra-ér, two syllables

e.g. traigo, as trai-go, two syllables

The letter u, when following g or q and preceding e or i, is silent, unless it has a dieresis (¨). This is the only silent vowel in Spanish. Otherwise u follows the same rules that apply in Latin, as for becoming a w sound. Note that instead of writing qü, Spanish simply changes to cu. Therefore remember that unlike Latin, qu always equals k.

The Patterns of Phonetic Transformation section includes vowel shifts, consonant shifts, initial letters, final letters.  For example:

A word beginning with a voiceless consonant followed by l, i.e., cl, fl, or pl, would usually change to begin with ll (likewise in Portuguese to ch and in Italian to chi, fi, and pi). This seems to be the origin of nearly all Spanish words beginning with ll. But in Latin, these combinations did not exist within a word, except in compounds; ll there usually derives from palatized ll within a Latin word.

e.g.: clamare → llamar

e.g.: flamma → llama

e.g.: planum → llano

e.g.: illa → ella

Grammatical Development covers a number of topics.  I thought the development of the Spanish adverb ending -mente was particularly cool, especially since it parallels the development of the English adverb ending -wise.

Vulgar Latin developed a new, simple way to form adverbs from adjectives. It was to use the adjective (in the ablative feminine singular, of course) to modify mente, in the ablative, to form the phrase with — mind, or rather with — manner. This is paralelled in English with the suffix -wise, as in likewise, clockwise. In Spanish, the -mente forms a suffix on the adjective.

e.g.: timida mente → tímidamente, fearfully (originally, with fearful mind)

e.g.: frecuenti mente → frecuentemente, frequently

Essential Derivatives tells you, among other things, how to spot a non-Latin word:

First it should be pointed out that about a fifth of all Spanish words were not derived from Latin. Most of these came from Gothic and Arabic (see the history above), though of course many others are from Basque (a peculiar little non-Indo-European language that somehow survived in a little pocket of the Pyrenees), French, English, etc.

The fortunate thing about Gothic words is that they tend to have old or everyday English cognates.

e.g.: norte = north

e.g.: guerra = war

And Arabic words tend to bear the distinctive al- prefix (Arabic for the), sometimes assimilated.

e.g.: al-manākh → almanaque

e.g.: al-roz → arroz

...and provides an extremely useful list of corresponding particles:

ille → el	ad → a	altero → otro	ad horam → ahora
illa → (el)la	de → de	nos alteros → nosotros	deunde → donde
illos → (el)los	in → en	vostra mercede → usted	inter → entre
uno → un(o)	cum → con	multo → mucho	magis → más
una → una	sine → sin	pauco → poco	minus → menos
sic → sí	per → por	tanto → tanto	tam → tan
ad sic → así	pro → para	bene → bien	tam bene → también
non → no	super → sobre	illic → allí	tam paucum → tampoco
si → si	quem → quien	jam → ya	toto → todo
et → e → y	aliquem → alguién	heri → ayer	tota via → todavía
aut → ot → o	quid → que	hodie → hoy	post → (des)pues
nec → ni	quando → cuando	semper → siempre	vice → vez
quam → que	quanto → cuanto	numquam → nuncuan → nunca	facit → hace
qui → que	qualis → cual	quomodo → quomo → como

And finally a word of encouragement: 

Once Spanish and Latin are learnt, it is no great feat to pick up at least a reading knowledge of Portuguese...

After reading through all that, I think I believe him!

This article pretty much gives me all I needed to make my "learn a little Spanish based on your Latin" project into a full-on introduction to practical linguistics.  What isn't included here, can be tracked down based on what is included here.  I'm feeling more and more optimistic about this actually working.